Mixed Race Studies

Poll Finds Hope Is Running High for Next Mayor of New York City

The New York Times
2013-12-13

Kate Taylor and Dalia Sussman

With Bill de Blasio’s inauguration less than a month away, New Yorkers are highly optimistic about his mayoralty — but they remain skeptical that he can achieve major changes on some of the core issues that defined his candidacy, like the widening gap between the rich and poor and the scarcity of affordable housing, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

Despite his four years as the city’s public advocate, Mr. de Blasio — who surged from behind late in the primary season to capture the Democratic nomination, and then coasted to a landslide victory in November — remains unfamiliar to many New Yorkers. More than half of city residents said they did not yet know enough about the mayor-elect, who takes office on Jan. 1, to form an opinion of him.

Still, 73 percent of city residents said they were generally optimistic about the next four years. About two-thirds said Mr. de Blasio would bring about real change in the way things are done. And while most said the Bloomberg administration favored the wealthy, a plurality said they expect Mr. de Blasio to treat rich, poor and middle-class New Yorkers equally. A majority said they believe he would have a positive effect on schools…

…Mr. de Blasio, whose wife, Chirlane McCray, is black, featured her and their two children prominently in his mayoral campaign, and captured 96 percent of the black vote in the general election, according to an exit poll by Edison Research. More than half of black New Yorkers polled said they believed that having the first biracial couple as mayor and first lady would help transform race relations in the city.

Mr. de Blasio has made clear that his wife will play an active role in his administration. Half of city residents, including a majority of women and six in 10 blacks, said they supported this, though 85 percent said they did not know enough about Ms. McCray to have an opinion of her…

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White mayor, black wife: Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray shatter an image in New York City

Minneapolis Star-Tribune
2013-11-16

Jesse Washington, National Writer/Race and Ethnicity
The Associated Press

Another milestone is passing in America’s racial journey: The next mayor of New York City is a white man with a black wife.

Even in a nation with a biracial president, where interracial marriage is more accepted and common than ever, Bill de Blasio’s marriage to Chirlane McCray is remarkable: He is apparently the first white politician in U.S. history elected to a major office with a black spouse by his side.

This simple fact is striking a deep chord in many people as de Blasio prepares to take office on Jan. 1, with McCray playing a major role in his administration…

Read the entire article here.

Many Black New Yorkers Are Seeing de Blasio’s Victory as Their Own

The New York Times
2013-11-10

Michael M. Grynbaum

Reporting was contributed by Michael Barbaro, Kia Gregory, Winnie Hu, Sarah Maslin Nir, Julie Turkewitz and Vivian Yee.

A black janitor in Brooklyn almost shouted out the name when asked about his vote in the mayoral race. Bill de Blasio, he said, “knows my struggle.”

In the Bronx, some African-American voters defaulted to a shorthand: “the man with the black wife.” Nobody thought it necessary to explain whom they meant.

And in a Brooklyn housing project, a lifelong resident said he was tired of mayors who, in his mind, had pitted blacks against whites. Mr. de Blasio, he declared, “is black and white.”

Of all the records shattered by Mr. de Blasio’s landslide victory, perhaps the most remarkable is that virtually every vote cast by black New Yorkers — 96 percent — went his way. He captured a bigger portion of the black vote than David N. Dinkins in 1989 when he was elected New York City’s first black mayor with 91 percent of the black vote, according to exit polls.

After the divisive tenor of the Giuliani years, and the deep grievances engendered by the stop-and-frisk police tactics of the Bloomberg era, black New Yorkers are now claiming Mr. de Blasio’s victory as their own. In postelection interviews, dozens of black New Yorkers said that Mr. de Blasio’s personal touch, his biracial family and his pledge to help the working-class and poor had affected them deeply. His victory, they said, was a chance to gain a voice in City Hall after two decades of leadership they viewed as inattentive, distant and, at times, even callous…

Read the entire article here.

The 99% Mayor

New York Magazine
2013-10-27

Chris Smith

Bill de Blasio’s promise may also be his problem.

He is joking, but he’s not kidding. “When I spoke last time, they needed a much smaller room,” Bill de Blasio says to laughter. “This is the glory of American democracy!” Exactly one year earlier, De Blasio had appeared before the same group, the Association for a Better New York, an alliance of city businesses and civic organizations; the turnout then, in October 2012, was 400, and the reaction was chilly—especially when De Blasio unveiled what would become a signature element of his run for mayor, a proposal to tax the wealthy to pay for new pre­kindergarten and after-school programs. This morning—fresh off an improbable, resounding victory in the Democratic primary—De Blasio is greeted by a sold-out crowd of 800 and a standing ovation.

Still, there’s a bit of tension served with the scrambled eggs: De Blasio unflinchingly repeats his vow to boost taxes, to which he adds emphatic praise for labor unions and higher minimum wages. To lighten the mood, De Blasio improvises a running joke. He decries the decline in city and state funding to the City University of New York, and the table directly in front of the podium—full of CUNY executives—breaks into loud applause. A few paragraphs later, De Blasio says he wants to restore $150 million in funding to CUNY, producing the same thrilled, noisy result. “I love these guys!” he cracks. “Whenever I need a little pick-me-up, I’ll just say the word ‘CUNY’ and this whole table will erupt!” When he opens the floor to questions, a woman from a tech firm asks how the likely future mayor feels about her industry. “I would like to have seen the same vigorous applause as from CUNY,” he says, “so you need to think about that.” But De Blasio quickly makes it clear he’s joshing, that he loves the tech sector, too. Then, a few minutes later, a representative of the hospital industry stands up and praises De Blasio. “You know, I just want to say, I’ve lost my interest in CUNY,” De Blasio says, smiling. “I think the health-care sector is where I want to put my attention after all! They placated me better than CUNY did! CUNY, it was great while it lasted.”

More laughter, but this time there’s an uneasy undercurrent. And, at a table of real-estate executives, raised eyebrows and shaking heads. They’ve got nothing against hospitals or city colleges, mind you. They’re just wondering what, exactly, the city’s next mayor really stands for…

…Enter the candidate, sweating and laughing. “Hey!” De Blasio says, bounding through the front door of his Brooklyn house and spotting me sitting at the kitchen table with his wife and son and noticing that I’m wearing a dress shirt and tie. “Chris Smith thinks he’s on East 79th Street, in a townhouse!”

Which is funny and self-deprecating, because this sure isn’t the $30 million Bloomberg manse. The De Blasio homestead in Park Slope is a humble three-story rectangle covered in faded green-painted wood paneling. Inside, the first floor is a combined living room and kitchen, all of it well worn. On one wall is a small, framed drawing of the “Sodium Avenger,” a superhero created by daughter Chiara to lovingly tease Mom for banning salt from the dinner table. On the opposite wall is a vivid yellow-and-red floor-to-­ceiling poster commemorating the mid-eighties Artists Against Apartheid movement; his wife, Chirlane McCray, did poetry readings and is listed among the performers. If I needed any further indication that the city is on the verge of a radical change in mayoral style from Bloomberg, who seems as if he were born in a pin-striped suit, there’s the 52-year-old De Blasio himself: He’s just back from his daily workout at the 9th Street Y and wearing a frayed, sweat-soaked blue T-shirt and baggy gray sweatpants…

…As his own life has become more public, De Blasio has propelled his family into the spotlight with him. Having cheery, mixed-race kids has paid political dividends, but De Blasio claims his motivation is educational as much as anything else. “You have to understand our family is different in the way we think about things. Chirlane and I met in City Hall; we had both had a history of activism,” he says. “We talked about it in broad ways; it was unspoken that we were going to pursue not only our love, our relationship, but our commitment to the world, and that was going to be a given in our lives … These are kids who, by the time Chiara was 5 and Dante was 2, they had slept overnight in the Clinton White House. [The kids] both got so much out of this experience this year, they got some real-life lessons about how the world works, but they also gained a lot of strength, a lot of confidence, a lot of understanding.”…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Cool: Bill de Blasio’s Fresh Electoral Asset

The Atlantic
2013-11-06

Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

The New York mayor-elect’s family—both fascinatingly ordinary and shockingly modern—proved to be one his greatest strengths.

“I’m Bill de Blasio, and I’m not a boring white guy.”

How’s that for a political opener? This is how the New York mayor-elect describes himself. At an August fundraiser for the Young Progressives for de Blasio, his daughter Chiara introduced him to the crowd, making an appeal for a new kind of inclusive city politics. Flanked by her entire family, she remarked, “If we’re gonna bring new ideas to the table and create a world, a society … where everyone has a chance, we need to start listening to everybody’s ideas.”

What are these bold and inventive ideas of the new mayor? Some of them follow a traditional Democratic nesting doll scheme: good government followed by more jobs succeeded by affordable housing topped off by better schools. Add in reason, compassion, equality, and whoomp! There it is—a consummate progressive platform. But the de Blasio campaign offered another idea that most campaigns can’t: the racially integrated family.

Like it or not, it works.

De Blasio is white. His wife, Chirlane McCray, is black. Their two children, Dante and Chiara, are biracial. Their campaign literature relentlessly spotlighted the effortless interracial cool of Brooklyn bohemia—that wonderful, eucalyptus-scented world of woody brownstones, aromatic teas, and gloriously integrated Cheerios breakfasts. His website features his family and marriage first, ahead of “Issues.” At his rallies, his wife and children are the feature rather than the curtain call. His mailings ask recipients to “Meet the BROOKLYN FAMILY who’s fighting to change New York.” They picture the smiling family, drinking orange juice and playing Trivial Pursuit…

Read the entire article here.

De Blasio Is Elected New York City Mayor

The New York Times
2013-11-05

Michael Barbaro

David W. Chen, City Hall Bureau Chief

Bill de Blasio hugged his son, Dante, at an election night party on Tuesday. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Bill de Blasio, who transformed himself from a little-known occupant of an obscure office into the fiery voice of New York’s disillusionment with a new gilded age, was elected the city’s 109th mayor on Tuesday..

His overwhelming victory, stretching from the working-class precincts of central Brooklyn to the suburban streets of northwest Queens, amounted to a forceful rejection of the hard-nosed, business-minded style of governance that reigned at City Hall for the past two decades and a sharp leftward turn for the nation’s largest metropolis.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat who is the city’s public advocate, defeated his Republican opponent, Joseph J. Lhota, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

It was the most sweeping victory in a mayor’s race since 1985, when Edward I. Koch won by 68 points, and it gave Mr. de Blasio what he said was an unmistakable mandate to pursue his liberal agenda….

…To an unusual degree, he relied on his own biracial family to connect with an increasingly diverse electorate, electrifying voters with a television commercial featuring his charismatic teenage son, Dante, who has a towering Afro…

Read the entire article here.

Diverse Neighborhood Has Mixed Enthusiasm About New York City Mayor’s Race

The New York Times
2013-11-03

Cara Buckley

The last presidential candidate Steve Waldman voted for was Hubert H. Humphrey. The last mayor he cast a ballot for was Edward I. Koch. And he’ll be darned if he is going to break his nonvoting streak by partaking in the mayoral election on Tuesday.

The Republican candidate, Joseph J. Lhota, reminds him too much of Rudolph W. Giuliani, of whom he takes a dim view. The Democratic candidate, Bill de Blasio, strikes him as likely to help people who abuse welfare. Mr. Waldman, a 65-year-old computer supplier, sees the city is on a reverse Robin Hood course — with parking fines, bridge tolls and assorted high taxes — and extracting more dollars from people like him…

…With New York City on the verge of electing a new mayor for the first time in 12 years, the people of Sheepshead Bay, with its mosaic of Russians, Irish, Italians and Jews, have views on the city’s prospects that are as diverse as their neighborhood. The community can at times seem ethnically segmented, but the four-decade-old El Greco serves as an enduring melting pot, and draws hordes of local residents by the boothful each weekend…

…Ms. McField, who works as an accountant for the Administration for Children’s Services, said she yearned for an end to the Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactics that Mr. de Blasio has vowed to change. Ms. McField said that many of her family members had been harassed by the police, including her husband, John McField, 36, a former corrections officer who recently returned from serving as an Army specialist in Afghanistan.

“Being black in New York, we see a lot of things that other people don’t see,” Ms. McField said as her family tucked into brunch. “It’s emotional for me,” she added, her eyes welling, “It’s targeting.”…

…Yet Luchia Larrazabal, a caregiver who was eating with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, said she pinned her hopes on Mr. de Blasio to help bridge one of the city’s enduring issues — racial schisms. After all, he is white, his wife is black and their two children are biracial.

“Because of the mixed race,” Ms. Larrazabal said, “I look forward to him uniting everyone.”

Read the entire article here.

The Uniqueness of Dante de Blasio

Gotham Gazette: The Place or New York Policy and Politics
New York, New York
2013-09-24

Andy Beveridge, Professor of Sociology
Queens College, City University of New York

As New York took in the extent of the win by Bill de Blasio in the Democratic primary for mayor, the impact of a powerful television ad starring his son Dante seemed plain.

The ad hit on de Blasio’s main campaign points of taxing the wealthy, ending a “stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color” and universal pre-K. But it was the messenger that made it a show-stopper: A mixed-race kid with an exuberant Afro speaking to the camera about how his dad was “the only Democrat with the guts to really break with the Bloomberg years.”

De Blasio’s wife is a black woman, and both Dante and Chiara (his daughter) are mixed race. With his family and the ad featuring his son playing key roles in his campaign, de Blasio split the black vote almost evenly with former comptroller Bill Thompson, the only black candidate for mayor.

Remember, in the primary between Hillary Clinton and Obama, who is mixed race, in 2008 Hillary Clinton did better among white and Hispanic voters than she did overall, and Barack Obama won the black vote by a very wide margin in an overall close race. In terms of who voted for whom, race mattered.

As Joe Lenski, the man behind the exit polls, said in the Daily News, “I don’t know if I could ever remember a race where a black guy is (close to) losing the black vote, the woman is losing the woman vote, the Jewish guy is losing the Jewish vote. It’s quite impressive …. De Blasio did a good job of saying, ‘I’m one of you even though I’m not personally one of you.’ He was able to say, ‘my wife is African-American, my kids are multiracial.”

How unique is Dante de Blasio, the 16-year-old superstar of the 2013 elections, who communicated this important message? Just how many New Yorkers are non-Hispanic males who would identify themselves as black and white? An analysis of 2010 Census data shows that very few young New Yorkers are black and white, and even fewer are non-Hispanic black and white. Furthermore, there are much lower proportions of such individuals in New York City in the country at large. These data are presented in the accompanying table, and some are summarized in the two charts below…

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De Blasio Responds to Lhota’s Doomsday Ad With a Cheery One

Politicker
2013-10-17

Colin Campbell

Tale of Two Ads

A day after Joe Lhota released an ad warning of apocalyptic results if rival Bill de Blasio is elected mayor–complete with photos of race riots and corpses–Mr. de Blasio is out with a new spot of his own.

But Mr. de Blasio’s ad, narrated by his daughter Chiara, is almost saturated in sweetness.

“From the start of this campaign, Bill de Blasio has offered a vision for New York that leaves no one behind. Now that my dad’s on the move. His opponents are on the attack,” says the older of the de Blasio kids, wearing her signature rose-adorned headband, as cheery music plays…

Read the entire article here.

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

HarperCollins Publishers
2013-09-10
544 pages
Trimsize: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9780060882389; ISBN10: 0060882387
eBook ISBN: 9780062199126; ISBN10: 0062199129

Carla Kaplan, Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

New York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: the story of a group of women collectively dubbed “Miss Anne.”

Sexualized and sensationalized in the mainstream press—portrayed as monstrous or insane—Miss Anne was sometimes derided within her chosen community of Harlem as well. While it was socially acceptable for white men to head uptown for “exotic” dancers and “hot” jazz, white women who were enthralled by life on West 125th Street took chances. Miss Anne in Harlem introduces these women—many from New York’s wealthiest social echelons—who became patrons of, and romantic participants in, the Harlem Renaissance. They include Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, Texas heiress Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, British activist Nancy Cunard, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, educator Lillian E. Wood, and novelist Fannie Hurst—all women of accomplishment and renown in their day. Yet their contributions as hostesses, editors, activists, patrons, writers, friends, and lovers often went unacknowledged and have been lost to history until now.

In a vibrant blend of social history and biography, award-winning writer Carla Kaplan offers a joint portrait of six iconoclastic women who risked ostracism to follow their inclinations—and raised hot-button issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the bargain. Returning Miss Anne to her rightful place in the interracial history of the Harlem Renaissance, Kaplan’s formidable work remaps the landscape of the 1920s, alters our perception of this historical moment, and brings Miss Anne to vivid life.